My friend Joe, a man has who traveled the line between art and technology at least as frequently as I have, recently forwarded this from CNN contributor Bob Greene:
Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal selects the writer each week for a terrific column called "Five Best." The premise is simple: One man or woman who is an expert in a given field is asked to recommend and write brief reviews of five books he or she loves that were published any time in history. The column turns that culture of newness, of hotness, on its head, with great results. Readers of the column, Rabinowitz told me, eagerly seek out the books in libraries or in used bookstores. She said that she tells each week's writer of the column not to worry whether or not readers have ever heard of the books; she instructs them: "The more obscure, the better."
Greene reminds us in his column that there are millions of titles available for free in the collective libraries of the world, and we shouldn't allow a culture that believes "new" = "good" (read: "iPhone v2304.x") to turn us off that subject.
I'll go him one further. Technology, with a little help from its friends, can make those millions of titles available for us. One such example is Project Gutenberg, which came to my aid this weekend by making available the works of a 16th-century Italian epic poet whose name popped up in other research I was pursuing. As much as I lament at times that communications technology has affected the basic elements of life, this access, combined with the converstation starter that is Wikipedia, if of great use to a poet who is writing his way into places in which he is not an expert.
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